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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-03T08:08:53+00:00

I have a database with about 10 tables and they are all interconnected in

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I have a database with about 10 tables and they are all interconnected in some way(foreign keys, assosiative tables).

I want to use all that data to plot it on my instance of Google Map as markers with infoboxes and be able to filter the map.

Judging from the Google Maps Articles you have to use XML with the data from the database to plot the markers and everything else.

But what would be the right way to generate that XML file? Have a huge SQL statement to generate one XML file with entire data from all tables upon the load of the web-page and the map or is there a more correct approach for this?

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  1. Editorial Team

    You in no way have to use XML to place markers on an instance of Google Maps. You could, but you don’t have to if it seems difficult. I work a lot with the Google Maps V3 API and I would recommend you export your data to JSON and embed it in your document using PHP or make it available for JavaScript to load using Ajax.

    Creating interactive Markers from the data is REALLY easy. You just need to iterate over your data, create a Marker object for each point you want on the map, supply some HTML you want displayed in the info window and show that info window on the Marker’s click event.

    Instead of walking you through with teaspoon accuracy I’ll refer you to the Google Maps API v3 beginner tutorial which among other things includes examples of how to create Markers and display them on the map.

    Fun fact, you can control which icon is displayed for each marker (you can supply an URL to any image you want), as well as make them bounce. To summarize, you have way more control using JavaScript than if you went with XML.

    Regarding performance, I would heed cillosis’ advice and cache your MySQL data in which ever format you end up choosing. If you were to go with JSON you could cache the result of that as well. You can simply save the output in a file called something like “mysql-export-1335797013.json”. That number is a Unix timestamp with which you can extrapolate when the data needs to be refreshed.

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